The Fairfax strike: what is the core of news?

Update March 17 2016: Today in the wake of Fairfax staff walking out en masse we revisit a piece from May 2014 where Nic Christensen looks at the structural factors driving print redundancies and questions how far a publisher can cut the core of journalism and still remain credible.

Journalists at the Herald describe how SMH editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir yesterday addressed the newsroom in an “emotional” exchange with staff.

“Darren called all the staff together and actually got quite emotional himself. He wasn’t crying or anything but you could see he was visibly shaken by having to tell us the news,” said one journalist.

“There were certainly tears in the newsroom, some staffers ran out crying.

“The photographers were all pretty emotional especially, when they realised half of them were going to go.”

If you look at challenges facing Fairfax management the structural pressures are, once again, driving these latest cuts.

Many senior editors and journalists inside the company privately question this more hopeful interpretation of Fairfax’s future fortune and whether a revival, against the broader structural challenge of moving from print, will last.

Standard Media Index, which tracks the expenditure of Australia’s big media buying agencies, records how in March 2011 metropolitan newspapers had advertising revenue of $76.3m while in March of this year those same newspapers had only $42m – down 26% year-on-year.

Having spent my early years in journalism at The Daily Telegraph and The Australian I can attest to the importance of photojournalism to the practice of both print and online journalism.

I can recall a number of times at News where a news story would fail to run, get moved towards the back of the book or had to be reshot because the photo wasn’t good enough.

Pictures are an incredibly important factor in storytelling and I question whether News Corp management would ever take the view that its in-house “shooters” could be replaced by the likes of a photo agency such as Getty Images.

That’s not to denigrate the Getty snappers – if things follow the same course as the PageMasters outsourcing of subbing, I suspect some will be ex-Fairfax staffers themselves. But the face-to-face newsroom relationship is important to creating a good brief for a news photograph.

The question increasingly for Fairfax management appears to be: are there any parts of the newspaper, beyond the actual editing of the newspaper, which they believe can’t be outsourced or placed into the hands of contributors? As one Fairfax staffer told Mumbrella, yesterday: “What do we keep? Is it the investigations team? Sport? At what point is everything bar the news desk outsourced?”

The answer to this question will be watched keenly in the coming weeks and months by journalists, readers and advertisers alike.

Nic Christensen is the media and technology editor of Mumbrella.
Within the Mumbrella team Nic's responsibilities include writing about media (mainly television, radio and outdoor), media agencies, ad technology and media policy. He is former media writer for The Australian and has also worked as a reporter for The Daily Telegraph and senior producer for Radio 2GB.

“The publisher will continue to move away from print towards a digital future where readers pay for content, but this will likely mean continued declines in print revenues as Fairfax trades the more lucrative print dollars for the so-called “digital dimes”. … sadly, this is just wishful thinking on the part of publishers. Who believes consumers pay for generic content and shared pictures? That sort of content they can access freely elsewhere. Surely the successful publishers will be those that produce unique content and exclusive pictures – something that commands a price. What Fairfax journos are striking for is an acknowledgement that quality counts; they don’t want to see their brand trashed.

Deja vu. All over again. Fairfax is simply reactive. It is ridiculous to be out in public claiming a level of confidence when all of the health indicators are lousy. Circulation is terrible. All the key papers are losing or have lost core audience. Advertising is awful and getting worse. They talk about a digital “future”, but don’t mention that there is no money in it.
The company leadership clearly has no clear ideas. So they fumble from shock announcement to redundancy and then another shock. They don’t have the guts to say: we will have great newspapers/web sites and will make them pay – or bust!
I think they don’t have a clue. So Fairfax will simply die slowly from a lack of oxygen.

It’s a business, not a charity. . Either it makes money or it goes under and everyone loses their jobs. . Going on strike is ludicrous and will only make things worse. ‘editorial integrity’ matters for nothing if the company is on the way to going bust. The unions, again, will end up making their members redundant if they carry on.
It’s sad, but other media companies will have to bring in similar measures or only Murdoch will be left.

It is dreadful for any individual to lose his or her job for reasons not of their own doing. However, painful though this will clearly be for the journalists and photographers concerned, it is we, the Australian community that has the most to lose if and when it is no longer possible for Fairfax and others to do good investigative work. What passes as ‘news’ and ‘the truth’ will eventually be left in the hand of Press Releases and Spin Doctors – a very unhealthy state of affairs in any democracy.

It’s business model and the entire middle-man/distributor/advertiser business model that dominated Australia for decades and supported local commercial media is gone.

The likes of News Corp may attempt to control the market through artificial scarcity and bullshit copyright laws, but that’s akin to pissing into a hurricane. And Fairfax is no News Corp.

There simply isn’t the revenue to support Fairfax, not when it’s playing second fiddle to Seek, Realestate.com and all the others who thumped it a decade ago. That two billion market capitalisation is ridiculous and based on nothing but a faint hope time will reverse and the population will fall in love with newspapers again. It won’t and they won’t.

You’re right @ AJ Grant — but profitability is all about managing costs AND growing revenues. So far, all Fairfax has done is address the cost side of the ledger. They have cut a massive amount of cost out of the business (necessarily) and continue to do so, but no business ever cut its way to success. Meanwhile masthead revenues continue to plunge year after year. They have yet to come up with a convincing narrative or plan around how they are going to stop this decline and indeed, GROW revenues. The only part of Fairfax that is growing is Domain .

@James: the flak folk are already in charge and it’s fairly obvious. In fact even senior editors are not hiding it. Check out the recent send off for a senior AFR editor – the booze was paid for by UBS and Nine Entertainment (who’ve just floated amid some excellent coverage) and the event was chock full of flaks like Cato and the various TV spinners. Amazingly, all of this was actually promo in the AFR itself!

That ship already sailed. There’s been blatant problems with journalistic integrity in Australia for over 2 decade now. The decline of Fairfax and News Ltd is and the public’s mistrust of Australian journalism are not unrelated facts btw – every time an advetorial got written, everytime a paper went on a “campaign” and everytime a journalist wrote for their advertisers of thier bosses political allies rather than their audience the public lost a little bit of confidence. Now that’s it gone it isn’t coming back.

It’s sad – I hate to see anyone lose their job and there are some (very few) journalists with integrity that will get caught up in this. But when you treat your customers like dirt – which papers have been doing for a long long time now – you can’t be surprised when you wake up to find out no one buys your product anymore.

How much news is just native advertising anyway? It seems most newspapers are moving towards a marketing content model where many stories are just thinly disguised paid advertising plugs. Any news worth reporting is the news that many don’t want to hear. The rest is ads dressed up as human interest or current topics.

As a result newspapers are rapidly losing their credibility. Journalists are replaced with freelance content writers and stories are accompanied by a quickly “match this story” shot scrounged from a bank of freelance photographers through Gettys.

Our newspapers have become incredibly boring and set up to be the self serving vehicles for marketers to generate paid stories and ongoing revenue for publishers. The really pathetic thing is that these same people believe that deceiving the newspaper purchasing /online subscription consumer is perfectly OK.

News Ltd’s newspapers bleed money. They lose. It doesn’t matter because they are the propaganda that gets governments elected. Murdoch and co then seek handouts from the newly elected governments for their other subsidiaries. (Like potentially Foxtel getting into the NBN…). Really? Who knows? Fairfax have in the past exploited many corrupt greedy folk that Murdoch’s trash mags would never have touched. Oh well The Guardian is here to save us.

“‘the truth’ will eventually be left in the hand of Press Releases and Spin Doctors – a very unhealthy state of affairs in any democracy.”

Hahahah – it is now and has been for decades, probably always. As if Australia’s media preinternet was some sort of bastion of free speech. It was the same commercial shit we see today. Product placement. Favorable coverage. Ever heard of a negative real estate story run by MSM?

At least now horizontal communication is shining a light on dodgy media industry practice and if that light causes some, or many, to fail – good. The system is working.

Democracy is better served if we have a transparent, robust and diverse system, rather than a few dinosaur players manipulating the truth for profit.

Please have a look at the Fairfax share price tracking. This is completely ignorant of the human side of the changes happening at Fairfax but to all the people saying Fairfax is over – the market says you’re wrong.

What’s most annoying is that having worked at the business side of things, is that there’s a fair bit of fat that could be trimmed in that organisation without attacking the core of it’s production engine.

I ditched The Age years ago when they brought in the subscription model, although admittedly view some articles that are shared on my social feeds.
My new daily News provider is the BBC.com, for international news content that is credible and interesting, and while there are only a few local stories that are relevant, at least there isn’t 6 articles on trucks that have been stuck in that South Melbourne overpass, or 18 opinion pieces on Abbott/Turnbull, or a hero article on Sam Johnson’s struggles to get a paid acting gig. True investigative reporting in that last one. Jeesh.

As Fairfax cuts more and more of its frontline staff – ie the people who actually produce the product day in, day out – the business becomes more and more top heavy. When will we see meaningful cuts at the pointy end of the business? A few executives would save as much money as a few dozen journos.

Fairfax staff actually have my respect for this. They have stood up for their colleagues as well as standing up against pages to get more “impressions” (aka click bait).

What pretty much always gets understated in the conversations abotu declining revenue is audience trust. Yes, the internet killed the business model, but what killed it quicker was losing the respect and trust of thier readers. No one reads a paper they don’t trust, and in general print journalism has a pretty disgusting lack of respect for its audience. Native advertising never belonged in a newspaper and allowing it in a “business decision” was short term gain for long term pain.

At least this time the staff are actually standing up for integrity, which is more than we can say for a lot who have left the industry over the past few years.

I’m a news jjunkie. ! I used to buy newspapers and devour them. Great stories of investigative journalism were like reading a gripping crime thriller…except it was exceptionally real!

When newspapers first went online I had a huge array of newspapers from around the world to feed my habit. Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, New York Times, The Washington Post…… The best thing is they were all absolutely FREE!

Then media publishers had a Whoops Moment! Print circulations and income went into free-fall as consumers like me accessed all they needed without paying any money at all. Not surprising really. As they didn’t want to slam the equivalent of a digital door in the readers faces, there were limited views before encountering a paywall where readers would be forced to pay for ongoing access.

Then came the inevitable promises. Behind the paywall readers would gain exclusive access to news that would not be available in the freely available limited 29 free views or print editions. And they bundled the print editions in a vain attempt to save them as they were quietly dying on the vine.

Readers attention span online was incredibly short as they were used to scrolling past anything that didn’t immediately grab their attention. Traditional journalism didn’t cut it any more and the era of “click bait” stories began. Journalists were replaced by content writers and those that remained were encouraged to become the same. Sub Editors all but disappeared and the quality of news stories dropped accordingly. These same principles were also applied to print media.

To ramp up revenues publishers allowed paid “marketing content” hiding itself as a news story, along with native advertising. This made it harder and harder to separate real news stories from sneaky advertising attempts that really didn’t fool anyone. Where advertising did exist, it completely overtook the news pages with auto play invasive videos and pestering. Cross promotion posing as news also became rife.

Not surprisingly, consumers pushed back. Firstly by downloading apps that smashed the Paywalls and zeroed their views immediately to bring back free views. They simply did not want to pay for an online news service where they had to hunt for the news. Secondly, Ad-blockers cleared most sites of the ads that were clearly seen as visual pollution.

All of this has understandably impacted greatly on publishers as their business models were seriously flawed. And with leaking revenues their desparate attempts to prop it all up simply disrespected their readers and treated them like idiots.

Sadly, the worst outcome from all this is that the very people who are capable of delivering credible news (journalists) are being swept aside in favour of content writers who can deliver more clicks. In the last 24 hours journalists from Fairfax and The Guardian have been told that they are the major source of costs and will lose their jobs as their skills are no longer required.

I do feel sorry for the journalists who are being pushed aside to be replaced by sensationalist, comedic click bait content writers. Whilst publishers think putting the broom through their most valuable assets is the answer, I fail to see how this restores and cleans up their business models to return newspaper publishers to the land of credibility.

Folks. This is the internet. Nobody cares anymore.
Nobody reads NEWS and more importantly no one should have to pay to stay informed. people however pay to be entertained. This is why HBOGo subscriptions have gone up year on year.
These news outlets become automatic irrelevant the moment they hit PRINT.
And tools like Twitter, Instagram or Periscope every person with a phone becomes a publisher allowing the world to snack on the information they like.
Gone are the days where an in depth investigation was being broken by a hard hitting newspaper with a hidden source.
Its really sad.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the incredible amount of talented professionals who right now are unemployed, my heart goes out to them and their families – this whole thing feels wrong. It’s like watching your favorite museum close its doors.

Strikes only work if they can bring pressure to bear. In this case no pressure can be brought to bear, because the strikers have already been told they are no longer required. Absenting themselves now only brings forward their imminent departure.

To an outsider, the whole exercise looks like a ship’s crew holding an indignation meeting while the ship they are on is sinking.